Increasingly, devices and systems within people's homes, business environments, and public infrastructures are configured to self-monitor, gather data, and alert end users to potential malfunctions, supply outages, emergency conditions, and other situations in which end users may need to act. Such devices and systems are known generally as internet-of-things (IoT) devices. The IoT devices are electronic devices that gather data and communicate data over the Internet. For example, an IoT device may be a smart watch, an Internet-connected appliance, a smart thermostat, or the like. The data gathered by these IoT devices can be communicated over device-to-device communication channels (e.g., with other IoT devices), directly from IoT devices to end user devices, or from the IoT devices to backend systems associated with the IoT devices.
As the popularity of IoT devices grows, more and more subscribers are utilizing IoT devices and systems to manage different aspects of their lives. This growth in popularity has led to IoT devices and systems that may be programmed to communicate via different and incompatible communication protocols. For example, communication protocols may be proprietary and/or highly customized to accommodate a purpose of a particular IoT device and the alert data that the IoT device is expected to generate. In other instances, IoT devices come from a plurality of different brands and may not be designed to communicate data with a common entity or cooperate with each other. For example, a user that has several different IoT devices is conventionally expected to have a separate account with each provider or manufacturer of the user's plurality of IoT devices. Further, each manufacturer conventionally provides its own user interface, such as a website or a smartphone application. The different communication protocols used by different IoT devices also limit the ability to route smart alerts to users that utilize data from a plurality of different IoT devices to form an alert.